Meta vows to battle disinformation – in Australia at least: Asian Tech Roundup

Plus: X in spat with India

Welcome to Computing's weekly roundup of tech news in Asia. This time we look at Meta doing in Australia what it said was pointless to do in the US, plus X is suing India over censorship.

Meta has promised to act on disinformation and deepfakes ahead of the Australian federal elections in May, deploying third-party fact checkers to assess content and take it down if it breaches the rules. "When content is debunked by fact-checkers, we attach warning labels to the content and reduce its distribution in Feed and Explore so it is less likely to be seen," said Cheryl Seeto, Meta's head of policy in Australia in a blog post. What's interesting is that in January, following Trump's US inauguration, Mark Zuckerberg decried third-party fact checkers saying they are “too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” vowing to remove them for US users.

India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology says it is investigating X over its AI chatbot Grok's use of Hindi expletives in its responses to queries. Meanwhile on Thursday, X announced that it is suing the Indian IT ministry, alleging expanded censorship powers granted to politicians to take down content. The timing of the lawsuit is interesting because X (and Twitter before it) were quite willing to acquiesce with India's takedowns in the past, and also because it come as another of Musk's other companies, Starlink, is trying to make inroads into India's satellite communications infrastructure.

Australia

• Meta has said it will deploy fact checkers to help detect and remove malicious content and deepfakes ahead of the Australian federal election in May. Source
• Australia’s investment policies are failing to deliver the so-called smart economy, according to a group of venture capitalists and tech entrepreneurs. Source
• Australian government agencies could be customers of military-grade spyware from Israeli vendor Paragon. Source

China

• US sanctions mean Huawei may soon lose the ability to install Windows on the PCs it manufactures without a special licence, forcing a shift towards Linux and its own HarmonyOS. Source
• Chinese EV manufacturer BYD has unveiled a new charging system that it claims is as fast as filling a tank with petrol. The company plans to build a “super e-platform" charging network across China. BYDs share price has increased sharply since the announcement. Source
• Baidu has announced the launch of two new AI models, ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1, a multimodal language model and reasoning model, respectively. Baidu claims they beat DeepSeek’s V3 and OpenAI’s GPT 4.5 against a variety of benchmarks.
• China plans to spend $55 billion on R&D in areas such as AI, quantum computing and semiconductors in 2025. This represents an increase of 10% from 2024 according to China's Ministry of Finance and as a budget item is surpassed only by spending on defence and debt interest payments. Source
• Baidu denied allegations mid-week that it had suffered an internal data breach after a top executive's teenage daughter posted personal details of other internet users online. Source
• China’s most valuable company, Tencent Holdings, posted better than expected quarterly results this week. The increase in profits is thought to be down to strong growth in games and AI-powered ads. Source
• Huawei and Guangzhou Automobile Group (GAC) have set up a new company to build a high-end car. Source
• As the Chinese government ramps up AI spending, a startup called Zhipu AI has secured 300 million yuan ($41.5 million) in state funding . Source

India

• The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has contacted X regarding recent instances where its AI chatbot, Grok, responded using Hindi slang and expletives . Source
• And on Thursday X sued India for expanding censorship powers to allow the easier removal of online content, according to Reuters. Source
• Vodafone Idea has officially launched its 5G in India, partnering with Nokia. Source
• Internet shutdowns in the face of civil unrest are an "acceptance of incapability" on the part of the administration to control the situation, say West Bengal’s opposition politicians. Source
• Saudi Aramco-backed industrial software firm Cognite opened its AI services centre this week in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru. The firm said it was exploring potential contracts with several large local companies. Source
• The government is tendering AI compute network storage platforms and cloud services with a focus on data localisation and security to support the AI industry. Source
• The Indian government has received proposals from 67 companies to build foundational AI models trained on Indian datasets, according to the ministry of electronics and information technology. 22 of these are focused on large language models and large multimodal models, while the other 45 are proposals to develop domain-specific small language models. Source

Japan

• The Japanese government will, from April, start encouraging the growth its own domestic cybersecurity industry to reduce dependence on foreign cybersecurity services. Source
• Semiconductor materials group JX Advanced Metals surged on its first day of trading after raising $3 billion in Japan’s biggest IPO in almost seven years . Source
• Japanese bank Softbank Group announced on Wednesday that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a startup that designed an Arm-based server chip, for $6.5 billion. The deal is expected to close later this year. Source
• AMD’s market share for GPUs in Japan has surged to 45%. Source

South Korea

• The US has classified South Korea as a ‘sensitive country’ for the first time. This limits the extent of cooperation in areas of advanced tech such as nuclear power and AI. Source
• Policy officials from Big Tech companies, including OpenAI and Google, have asked the Korean government for flexibility in implementing the AI Basic Act. Source
• LG Artificial Intelligence Research has released its own reasoning AI model, Exaone Deep, as open source. Source
• Samsung is facing "a do-or-die survival issue" in view of falling market share, its chairman has said. Source

Elsewhere in Asia

• Taiwan: Google plans to partner with Taiwan's MediaTek on the next version of its AI chips, Tensor Processing Units, that will be made from next year. A report says that Google chose MediaTek partly because of its strong relationship with TSMC and that fact that MediaTek charges Google less per chip than current partner Broadcom. Source
• Vietnam: Vietnam has approved construction of the country's first wafer fabrication plant with construction expected to be completed before 2030. Source
• Malaysia: Microsoft plans to launch its first cloud region in Malaysia, with three datacentres due to come online this year. Source